Don't Use Myth Consciously

Writers who really understand myth don’t use it consciously. There are very few things that are truly mythical. There’s a lot of stuff that’s famous, but very few things that are the stuff of myth and legend.

JOHN MILIUS

Most Humor Depends on Specificity

Most humor depends on specificity. It’s funnier to say that a cheese steak tastes better when you’re leaning up against a Pontiac than when you are leaning up against a car.

CALVIN TRILLIN

Procrastination Is Available at Your Fingertips

Procrastination is available at your fingertips, the whole vast www world. Cat videos, vicious gossip about pop stars, survivalist blogs, right-wing paranoia, it’s all there. The Internet brought the barroom, the porn shop, the fleabag hotel lobby and the men’s locker room into every American home, and you can now hang out with ne’er-do-wells to your heart’s content without anybody knowing about it.

GARRISON KEILLOR

Never Read Bad Stuff

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.

JAMES LEE BURKE

Sentence by Sentence

My work accrues sentence by sentence. After an initial phase of sitting patiently, not so patiently, struggling to locate them, to pin them down, they begin arriving, fully formed in my brain. I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom. By myself, I know, though the source feels independent, recondite, especially at the start. The light will be turned on, a sentence or two will be hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper, carried upstairs to the manuscript in the morning. I hear sentences as I’m staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

JHUMPA LAHIRI

Drinking Is Bad for a Writer

One of the ways that drinking is bad for a writer—it’s bad for a carpenter, too—but it’s bad for a writer because it erases your most important quality, your memory. We’re the rememberers of the tribe. That’s what the tribe hires us for.

PETE HAMILL

Walk Out to the Horizon

I used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees, which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon. It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

You Won't Be Able to Quit

If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think “There must be something else people do,” you won’t be able to quit.

ALICE MUNRO

Respect the Intelligence of Young Readers

Respect the intelligence of young readers and never, ever, lie to them. They will love you for the former and crucify you should you ignore the latter.

CARMEN AGRA DEEDY

Writers Often Have the Cleanest Windows

Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.

MARK DAVID GERSON